The Red Sox are going from bad to worse.
It’s one thing for a team to come up short of the playoff race, but the Sox are now falling into obscurity.
After getting steamrolled by the Blue Jays, who hammered three home runs, including a 447-foot blast by Vladimir Guerrero Jr., in a 9-0 win over the Sox at Rogers Centre on Friday night, the irrelevant Red Sox are on the verge of one of their worst seasons in 30 years.
If they don’t win three of their last five games, they’ll fall short of the 78-win mark for just the third time in a full season since 1992. The Red Sox were this bad only in 2012 and 2014.
The good news is the Sox followed up 2012 with a World Series title in ‘13.
The bad news is they followed up their last-place finish in ‘14 with another terrible season in ‘15.
With this year’s team showing little life, and without any top prospects in the minors being near a big league debut, the Sox will have a lot of work to do to avoid mirroring their back-to-back last-place finishes in ‘14 and ‘15.
Alek Manoah and the Jays put on a clinic in Toronto on Friday.
The Blue Jays have dominated the Red Sox all year. They’re now 14-3 while outscoring the Sox 109-52 this season, more than doubling their opponents’ run total and doing so in overwhelming fashion.
Before popping bottles to celebrate Toronto’s playoff berth on Friday night, Manoah was once again looking like one of the brightest young pitchers in baseball.
The 6-foot-6, 285-pound right-hander was slinging in mid-90s fastballs and making Red Sox hitters look silly on his disappearing change-up. The Sox didn’t collect a hit until the fifth inning, when Abraham Almonte hit a soft groundball to first base, but Manoah failed to cover the bag and Almonte reached on the infield single.
It was one of just two singles the Sox scratched together off Manoah, who should be a top-three finisher for the American League Cy Young Award this year.
The 24-year-old is leading the league with 196 2/3 innings to go with a 16-7 record and 2.24 ERA.
And he wasn’t even the star of the show on Friday night.
That honor belongs to Guerrero, who turned around a Nick Pivetta breaking ball and whipped it 117.5 mph off the bat, the hardest-hit ball against the Red Sox in the StatCast era. Before that, Aaron Judge had the record with a 117-mph shot off Craig Kimbrel in 2018.
Guerrero’s blast flew out of the stadium on a line to the upper part of the left-field seats. He dropped his bat as soon as he finished his swing and admired the hit, his 31st home run of the season.
Pivetta continued a very rough second half in which he completely ran out of gas and has hardly been competitive over a two-month stretch. He fell to 10-12 with a 4.51 ERA, a far stretch from the 3.31 ERA he carried into late June.
“The whole night he wasn’t able to have his curveball and he was limited,” manager Alex Cora told reporters on NESN after the game.
The Jays continued to slug off Tyler Danish in the sixth inning, when he served up a pair of no-doubters to Raimel Tapia and George Springer. Tapia yanked a low pitch to his pull-side for a solo shot, then Springer saw the juiciest 90-mph fastball he’ll ever see and demolished it for a three-run shot later in the inning.
“That’s a good hitting team,” Cora said. “They’re going to be in the division a long, long time. We’re changing the rules but not divisions. We have to make adjustments. They’ve had their way against us.”
The Sox just don’t have many pitchers who look like big leaguers right now. It’s been difficult for them to string together quality outings, and their lack of offense isn’t doing them any favors.
While Guerrero has 31 homers, four other Jays players have 22 or more. The Red Sox have Rafael Devers with 27 home runs, but nobody else with more than 16.
There are too many holes to count as the Red Sox enter the offseason, but for now they need to finish the season with a little bit of dignity.
If the Jays win again this weekend, they’ll tie the record for most wins (15) in a single season against the Red Sox. Only the ‘73 Tigers and ‘19 Yankees have beaten the Sox 15 times in a season.
If the Jays win twice, it’ll be an all-time record.
Brayan Bello takes the mound against Ross Stripling on Saturday at 3 p.m. ET.
